Oscars 2016: the good, the bad, and the Stacey Dash

Tim Robey29 February 2016 • 11:04am

Chris Rock killed the monologue and Ennio Morricone finally scored, but which clueless idiot invited Stacey Dash? The highlights and lowlights of the 2016 Academy Awards

The Good

1. Chris Rock

Once he’d decided to go ahead with the gig, Chris Rock was never going to soft-pedal the theme blaring out this year. He mined the entire #OscarSoWhite fracas as material for a virtual half-hour stand-up set, broken up in chunks across the night. His opening bit took just a minute or two to settle into its groove, before the audience got fully comfortable with the tone.

It grew funnier as he mocked Kevin Hart’s work-rate, and got roars when he hit on the traumas of racial oppressions past: “When your grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s hard to care about Best Documentary Foreign Short.” He struck a tone more of bullish exasperation than outrage, which seemed exactly the better, and funnier, way to go. And it gave the whole night a running theme that strangely – given all the criticism this year’s Oscars have attracted – glued it together pretty damn well.

Oscars 2016: Chris Rock Parodies white moviesPlay!02:46

2. That Mad Max: Fury Road tally

First it won a couple we might have guessed – Costume Design, for the lovably attired Jenny Beavan; production design. Make-up, then editing made it four. Onwards the Mad Max war-rig rumbled, until it racked up a remarkable six wins from its 10 nominations. Most figured that The Revenant would have wrestled a few of these away. The fact that it didn’t opened the giddy prospect that George Miller might scoop Best Director.

But these six trophies – double The Revenant’s eventual haul – add up to much more than a consolation prize, because each individual one of those craft contributions feels like a profound and integral element of the Max mix. It also meant that grottily dressed, sweary Australians made all the night’s most appealing speeches, and who didn’t enjoy that?

Good on the Oscars, and Rock, for swinging back at the diversity issue with every chance they got. Some of the sidebar skits were hit and miss, sure; but getting the 30 Rock star to do a kind of Scary Movie spoof of The Danish Girlwas so winningly crass it worked brilliantly.

Tracy Morgan as 'The Danish Girl', with a Danish pastryCredit:
ABC

4. Compton vox pops

So did Rock’s recorded interviews with a bunch of cinemagoers – all but one black – outside a Compton cinema. These were inspired, illuminating, and cut into the very marrow of the issue about America’s cultural divide. His non-leading questions about “white” films they hadn’t even heard of – Trumbo who? Bridge of what? – brought the house down.

Sometimes competitive Oscars really do feel like meaningful lifetime achievement awards, and such was very clearly the case with the 87-year-old Italian maestro, whose score for The Hateful Eight ties it back to earlier career peaks, specifically his work on John Carpenter’s The Thing. Morricone was visibly touched by his standing ovation, but the real bonus was seeing the exchange between him and his seat partner, the equally frail, equally legendary John Williams, a five-time winner who looked delighted at his contemporary’s triumph at long last.

Ennio Morricone, with his Italian translator, collecting his Oscar for The Hateful EightCredit:
Kevin Winter/Getty Images

6. Tina Fey

Fey has permission to play-act drunk on stage, in any context, forever. Her slurred “nonanees” sealed it.

7. Louis CK

It’s hard to imagine anyone else pulling off a skit about the obscurity of the Best Documentary Short category, which also imbued it with a kind of awed respect, better than Louis CK. “This Oscar’s going home in a Honda Civic,” he prophesied, by way of drumming up sympathy for one of the night’s least headliney victories. (He wasn’t to know the actual winner, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, already had one gold man to her name.)

8. Spotlight!

Morgan Freeman’s pause before he read out the Best Picture card recalled Jack Nicholson exactly a decade ago, when Crash beat Brokeback Mountain in a Best Picture upset that still gives all of Film Twitter recurring nightmares. Only this time, everyone was much more pleased. Spotlight’s a reassuringly solid choice – the safest bet, maybe, but also the soundest.

The bad

1. Sam Smith winning

The song’s just bad. The performance had a certain warbly oomph, to be fair. But for it to win, this thing, one of the weakest Bond themes ever? This is not a result to prompt national pride, more a crimson flood of shame. Smith’s speech, about being – he wasn’t sure on this point – possibly the first out gay man to win an Oscar, felt attention-grabby, craven, and kind of icky.

And wrong: Elton John and Dustin Lance Black, among others, could verify that. Generally speaking, if you want to claim precedent for something with the whole world tuning in, a five-second google wouldn’t be a bad bit of fact-checking to do first.

Asians and Jews are good at sums. So let’s bring a trio of children from said backgrounds on stage, dressed as accountants, pretending to be from the firm that tallies the results. This will be great. It won’t fall flat as a pancake. Promise.

Yeah, no, I'm not feeling @chrisrock jokes about Asian and Jewish accountants. Can we keep the high ground in this issue? #NoThanks#Oscars

Literally no one in the auditorium knew what Clueless star Dash – who’s on record for not supporting Black History Month – thought she was doing wafting past Rock and making a catastrophically feeble joke about it. The hand to mouth reaction of Canada’s nominated producer-singer The Weeknd said it all. It was tantamount to Charlotte Rampling getting up there and doing a “see, I’m so over it” impression of Easy-E.

Aaaannndd that was the only time Stacy Dash will ever be at the Oscars again.

One consolation for those nominees pipped to Best Animated Short? Not having three of those wildly annoying and overpromoted yellow tic tacs read their names out. Come, friendly bombs.

5. George Miller not winning

With the score standing Mad Max 6 – Revenant 2, everyone was poised for this as the tantalising shock of the night. We had to wait for a different one, and a different film was the beneficiary. It was an unexpectedly cheering Oscar ceremony, all round. But had this last great white hope panned out, it really would have been a lovely day.

George Miller, hard at work on Mad Max: Fury RoadCredit:
Warner Bros/Collin Gibson